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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 



BY 

/ 

LYMAN "ABBOTT 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE ALUMNI 

OF BANGOR THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, MAY 18, 

1898, ON "THE RELATION OF NATURE AND 

THE SUPERNATURAL TO THE CHRISTIAN 

THOUGHT OF TODAY" 



NEW YORK 
HABOLD J. HOWLAKD 

1899 



^ 



tf°l 



25852 



Copyright, 1899 
By LYMAN ABBOTT 



Two copie 



° ^^c-rvuo. 



FEB 20 1899* 






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PRINTED BY HAROLD J. HOWLAND 
AT THE NORWOOD PRESS. NORWOOD. MASSACHUSETTS 






THE SUPERNATURAL 



WE are to discriminate clearly between 
theology and religion, between life and 
the philosophy of life. My object this morn- 
ing is not to expound a complete system of 
philosophy, but to consider the effect of the 
change which is taking place in philosophy 
upon the religious life. 

The object of the minister is not to expound 
philosophy, but to promote life. He is not a 
teacher of theology, but a preacher of religion. 
He must be a theologian ; he must have a 
philosophy of the life which he is imparting ; 
nevertheless, his object is not to impart the 
philosophy, but to use the philosophy that he 
may impart the life. " I have come that they 
may have life, and that they may have it 
more abundantly," says Christ. And then he 
breathes upon his disciples and says, " Receive 
ye the Holy Spirit. As my Father hath sent 

B 1 



2 THE SUPERNATURAL 

me, even so send I you." We who are minis- 
ters of his grace are to be administers of his 
life. We are to impart life. We are to do 
this through truth ; nevertheless, for his min- 
isters truth is not an end, but a means to an 
end. Truth is instrumental. 

The teacher in the medical school teaches 
physiology and anatomy and hygiene; but 
when we get sick and send for a doctor, we do 
not send in order that we may receive a lec- 
ture on physiology or anatomy or hygiene. 
We send for the doctor that he may use his 
knowledge of physiology or anatomy or hy- 
giene to make us well. You break a bone : 
you do not want the doctor to tell you about 
bones, you want him to set the bone. So the 
object of ministers is not to lecture us on the 
philosophy of religion ; neither is it to ignore 
the philosophy of religion; it is to use the 
philosophy of religion to help men and women 
to live better, nobler, diviner lives. "The 
truth," says Christ, " shall make you free." 
" Sanctify them through thy truth ; thy word 
is truth." Truth is, then, an instrument. The 
object of truth is to set men free; it is to 
sanctify men, to make them holy. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 3 

The minister who simply expounds the 
truth does not understand his mission. His 
mission is so to use truth that men shall be 
made free ; that men shall be made holy. 
His ministry is, therefore, to be determined 
by fruits in the life. That is the best sermon, 
not which is a great pulpit effort, but which 
is helpful. If, young men, you have preached 
a sermon and some one comes up to you and 
says that was a great pulpit effort, hide your 
head in shame and go home and never write 
another like it. But if some one comes to you, 
with a little quaver in the voice and a little 
moisture in the eye, and says, " Thank you ; 
you have helped me this morning," thank God 
and go home and try to write another like it. 
That is the end of preaching — to use theology 
to help life. The test of the sermon is its 
fruitfulness in life; and that is the test of 
theology. 

We are not, however, to judge of a truth 
beforehand by the fruit which we think it 
will produce. It is the truth which makes 
free, not any kind of error. It is the truth 
which sanctifies men, not any kind of false- 
hood. All truth is safe. All error is danger- 



4 THE SUPERNATURAL 

ous. It is only the truth that the minister is 
to use. He is never to say, " This is the phi- 
losophy that my people are used to and this is 
the philosophy that I think will do' better ser- 
vice, and so, though I do not believe it, I will 
preach it." Never. It is only the truth he is 
to use, but he is always to use the truth. 
Truth is always an instrument. 

He is to distinguish, too, between the things 
he knows and the things he thinks, between 
certainties and hypotheses. He must have 
both, both certainties and hypotheses, but he 
must distinguish in his own mind between 
the two. It is absolutely certain that there 
is sunlight, and it is absolutely certain that 
that sunlight produces certain vital effects on 
humanity and vegetation ; and it is now the 
universally accepted hypothesis that the whole 
universe is rilled with an invisible, impalpable 
ether, and that sunlight is produced by undu- 
lations of that ether. The ether is a hypothe- 
sis. The sunlight is a certainty. In science we 
all recognize this distinction between the hy- 
potheses and the certainties. Unfortunately, 
we have not yet learned in theology to dis- 
tinguish between the hypotheses and the cer- 



THE SUPERNATURAL 5 

tainties. We generally quarrel about the 
hypotheses. 

It is, for instance, a certainty, I hope in 
the experience of all of us — certainly it must 
be a certainty in the experience of every min- 
ister, or he has no right in the pulpit — that 
God is. God is not a hypothesis which the 
minister has invented to account for the phe- 
nomena of creation. He knows that there is 
a " power not ourselves that makes for right- 
eousness," because when he has been weak 
that power has strengthened him, when he 
has been a coward that power has made him 
strong, when he has been in sorrow that power 
has comforted him, when he has been in per- 
plexity that power has counseled him, and he 
has walked a different path and lived a dif- 
ferent life and been a different man because 
there is that power — impalpable, invisible, 
unknown, and yet best and most truly known. 
But when he comes to ask himself for a defi- 
nition of this power, for an account of its 
attributes, and its relation to the phenomena 
about him, he enters at once into the realm of 
hypothesis. We know God in his personal 
relation to ourselves. What he is in himself 



b THE SUPERNATURAL 

and what he is in his relations to the great 
universal phenomena, that is matter of hy- 
pothesis. 

It is about the effect of a new hypothesis 
on our religious life that I am going to talk 
to you this morning. I am not going to con- 
sider which of two hypotheses is true ; I am 
going to try to describe two hypotheses, and 
consider their respective effects on the relig- 
ious life. I will describe them as matters of 
personal experience ; because I find that when 
I attempt to describe the old theology, some 
of my friends, who still hold to it, think I am 
describing it unjustly and unfairly; I do not 
wish to describe another man's opinion, be- 
cause I find it so difficult for other men to 
describe mine. 

As I look back, I can remember something 
of the view which it seems to me I held when 
I was entering into the ministry. It was 
something like this : There is a great and good 
God. He is somewhere in the center of the 
universe — whether in the body or out of the 
body I knew not, and yet in my conception I 
embodied him. He is the creator and the 
ruler of the world. He had made the world. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 7 

I conceived of him as making the world as an 
architect makes a building. I rather think 
somewhere, in some of my earlier sermons, 
that figure would be found worked out — he 
had turned it in a lathe ; he had erected the 
pillars ; he had woven the carpet of grass ; he 
had ornamented it with the flowers. You 
have heard that from other ministers, and no 
doubt you would have heard it from me when 
I was a young man. And as I conceived of 
God creating the world as an engineer creates 
an engine, so also I conceived of him regulat- 
ing this world as an engineer regulates the 
engine. When men said to me, " Do you be- 
lieve in miracles ? Do you believe that God 
has set aside natural law ? " I said, " Oh, no, 
but he uses natural law. As an engineer uses 
the steam and the fire, or as an electric engi- 
neer uses the electricity, so God uses the forces 
of nature. He is in his engine, with his hand 
on the lever ; he can add to its speed or he 
can diminish its speed, or he can halt it, or he 
can make it go backward, or he can turn it in 
the one direction or the other direction. He 
made the engine and he rules the engine." 
Something like that was my conception of God. 



8 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Similarly I conceived of him in his relation 
to men as a great king. He had issued cer- 
tain laws, and had attached certain punish- 
ments to those laws. In order to law there 
must be punishment ; a law without a penalty 
attached is only advice, not law. I conceived 
that God had issued laws, and to them had 
attached penalties. Those laws had come from 
His throne like edicts from an imperial Czar. 
They were righteous and just laws, and I had 
broken them, and the whole human race had 
broken them, and punishment was denounced 
against the whole human race for breaking 
them, and that punishment must be executed. 
And yet God was merciful and wished to spare 
men. And so his Son had come into the 
world, and had borne the punishment in order 
that the law might be carried out and still 
man might be forgiven. That God might both 
be just and the justifier of him that belie veth, 
some one had to bear the penalty which had 
been attached to the law. So I conceived of 
God as sitting apart from his creation which 
he had made and ruling it, and apart from 
men whom he had made and ruling them. 
And when I entertained this conception of 



THE SUPERNATURAL 9 

God, as sitting apart from the universe which 
he had made and ruling it, and apart from 
men whom he had made and ruling them, it 
seemed to me that the most fundamental ques- 
tion in theology was, Do you believe in the 
supernatural ? If a man did not believe in 
the supernatural, then all he believed in was 
the machine ; then he believed in the engine, 
but he did not think there was any engineer 
to control it ; then he believed in humanity, 
but he did not think there was any king to 
govern men. And one who believed simply 
in the engine without any engineer, and in the 
community without any king, was either an 
atheist or a deist; that is, either he believed 
there was no God, or else he believed in an 
absentee God, in a God who had nothing to 
do with the world, a God who had nothing to 
do with men. And it did not seem to me then, 
and it does not seem to me now, that there is 
much to choose between the belief in no God 
and the belief in an absentee God. For relig- 
ion consists, I recall to you again, not in a 
hypothesis that there is a God, but in a life 
lived under the inspiration of God; and if 
God is conceived as so far off that there is no 



10 THE SUPERNATURAL 

longer any intercommunication between God 
and the soul, lie is an absentee God, and life 
goes on without him. Under that conception 
there cannot be any vital religion, for religion 
is the inflowing of God upon life. 

" Religion," says Max Muller, " consists in 
the perception of the infinite under such mani- 
festations as are able to influence the moral 
character of man." If, then, God is repre- 
sented as absent from the universe so that he 
does not produce any influence on the conduct 
and character of man, there is no religion. 

Gradually my whole conception of the rela- 
tion of God to the universe has changed. I 
am sure that I have not lost my. experience 
of God. I am far more certain now than I 
was forty years ago that God is, and that God 
is not an absentee God. I am not quite so 
certain as I once was about some of the mani- 
festations which I once thought he had made 
of himself. I am a great deal more certain 
than I once was of his personal relation to me. 
My experience of God has changed only to 
grow deeper, broader, and stronger. But my 
conception of God's relation to the universe 
has changed radically. My hypothesis was — 



THE SUPERNATURAL 11 

God an engineer who had made an engine and 
sat apart from it, ruling it ; God a king who 
had made the human race and sat apart from 
men, ruling them. That was my hypothesis ; 
now I have another hypothesis. And I think 
the change which has come over my mind is 
coming and has come over the minds of a great 
many. I think that there is nothing original 
in what I am going to say to you this morn- 
ing, for I am only going to interpret to you a 
change, perhaps not altogether understood, 
which is being wrought in the mind of the 
whole Christian Church. I think my change 
only reflects your change. But whether that 
be true or not, I am sure the change has taken 
place in me. 

I now conceive of God as in his universe. 
I conceive of creation as a growth. I conceive 
of him as making the universe somewhat 
as our spirit makes our body, shaping and 
changing and developing it by processes 
from within. The figures from the finite 
to the infinite are imperfect and misleading, 
but this is the figure which best represents to 
me my own thought of God's relation to the 
universe : Not that of an engineer who said 



12 THE SUPERNATURAL 

one morning, " Go to, I will make a world," 
and in six days, or six thousand years, or six 
million thousand years, made one by forming 
it from without, as a potter forms the clay 
with skillful hand ; but that of a Spirit who 
has been forever manifesting himself in the 
works of creation and beneficence in all the 
universe, one little work of whose wisdom 
and beneficence we are and we see. 

Herbert Spencer says : " Amid all the mys- 
teries by which we are surrounded, nothing 
is more certain than that we are ever in the 
presence of an Infinite and an Eternal Energy 
from which all things proceed." I look out 
upon the universe and I see that it is a uni- 
verse, a variety in unity. I see that there is 
a unity in all the phenomena of nature, and 
that science has more and more made that 
unity clear, and I see that there is one Infinite 
and Eternal Energy from which all things pro- 
ceed. And I see too, it seems to me very 
clearly, that this Energy is an intellectual 
Energy ; that is, that the physical phenomena 
of the universe are intellectually related to 
one another. The scientist does not create the 
relations ; he finds them. They are ; he dis- 



THE SUPERNATURAL 13 

covers them. All science is thinking the 
thoughts of God after him. It is finding 
thought where thought has done its intellect- 
ual work ; it is learning what are those intel- 
lectual relationships which have been in and 
are embodied in creation. 

Matthew Arnold says : " There is a power 
not ourselves that makes for righteousness. " 
The unity of physical phenomena is not more 
certain than the unity of moral phenomena. 
It makes history possible, moral philosophy 
possible, sociology possible, the study of lit- 
erature and human life possible. We are each 
one of us an individual, and yet the nation 
has its entity and the human race its entity, 
and we are all one. The seventy millions of 
people in these United States are not seventy 
million separated grains of sand ; we are an 
organic nation. These many millions upon 
this globe, that have inhabited it we know not 
how long, and are to inhabit it we know not 
how much longer, are not like the grains of 
sand lying upon the ocean beach ; we are a 
unit, with a beginning, with a progress, with 
a history, with a development, with a moral 
law that unites and makes us one. As there 



14 THE SUPERNATURAL 

is, therefore, one power that makes for order 
in the natural universe, so there is one power 
that makes for righteousness in the moral 
universe ; and if it makes for righteousness it 
is a righteous power, as the power that makes 
for order is an intellectual power. In other 
words, I have come to believe that in the 
world of nature and back of all its phenomena, 
and in the world of men and back of all 
human phenomena, is one great intellectual 
and righteous Power manifesting himself in 
and through the world of nature, manifesting 
himself in and through the world of men. 

Perhaps some one will ask me here, "Do 
you believe in a personal God ? " A reporter 
of one of the daily papers once came to me ; 
he wanted to make a column of copy for his 
paper, and he had a long row of questions on 
the subject of theology. I was bowing him 
out of the room with gentle declination when 
he stopped me, saying : " Oh, but, Mr. Abbott, 
just one question: Do you believe in a per- 
sonal God ? " " Well," I said, " what do you 
mean by a personal God ? " He said : " I 
mean a great big man sitting up in the inner 
circle of the universe, ruling things." " No," 



THE SUPERNATURAL 15 

I said, " I do not believe in that kind of a per- 
sonal God." " Oh, well, then," he said, "you 
are a pantheist." I have long since learned 
that, if fine words butter no parsnips, hard 
words break no bones. If my new conception 
of God were pantheism, and I thought it were 
true, I hope I should dare to say, I am a pan- 
theist. But it is not pantheism. The differ- 
ence between saying that God is in all nature, 
and God is nature — the difference between 
saying that God is in all phenomena, and say- 
ing that God is simply the sum of all phenom- 
ena, seems to me plain enough — even for 
such a reporter of a daily newspaper to under- 
stand. Ko. I believe that I am in my body, 
equally regnant in every part of it ; but I am 
sure that I am something more than my body. 
I believe that God is in all phenomena, regnant 
in them all ; but I believe that he is some- 
thing more than the sum of all phenomena. 
He is more than any manifestation of himself. 
He is more, therefore, than the sum of all the 
manifestations of himself. 1 

1 A man is no less a person because he can speak in 
New York and be heard in Chicago, or press a button in 
Washington and set machinery in motion in Omaha. 
Extension of power does not lessen the personality of him 
who exercises it. 



16 THE SUPERNATURAL 

I am not going this morning to argue for 
one or the other of these conceptions. I am. 
not going to try to show you that the one is 
true and the other erroneous. I am going to 
try to consider with you the difference which 
this change in conception makes in the relig- 
ious life. This is the topic which I have been 
asked to speak on : The relation of nature 
and the supernatural to the Christian thought 
of today ; not to argue philosophically which 
is true, but to consider practically what is the 
effect of our changed conceptions on our spir- 
itual life. 

In the first place, then, I no longer recog- 
nize a distinction between the natural and the 
supernatural. When I thought that God sat 
apart from nature ruling over it as an engi- 
neer rules over his engine, then it seemed to 
me to be of essential importance that one 
should believe in the supernatural, that is, in 
the One who was apart from nature, and did 
rule over it. But now that I believe that God 
is in nature, ruling through it, and in human- 
ity, ruling in the hearts of men, all the nat- 
ural seems to me most supernatural, and all 
the supernatural most natural. For not now 



THE SUPERNATURAL 17 

and then in special episodes and exceptional 
interferences does the finger of God appear : 
not now and then, as when the engineer adds 
the steam or subtracts it, or reverses his en- 
gine, does the will of God show itself in life ; 
not now and then does the King appear as 
King, by the issuance of a new edict. God is 
in all of nature ; all its forces are the forces 
of God ; all its laws are the methods of God ; 
all its activities are the activities of God. 
And in human nature the laws of God are the 
beatific influences which proceed from him, 
the spiritual forces projected from him as the 
rays from the sun, and which vivify the hearts 
of those who receive them. 

Creation, therefore, is no longer the manu- 
facture of a globe by an architect or a builder. 
It is not something that God did six thousand 
years ago, and, ending, stopped to rest. Crea- 
tion is a continuous process. It is alwa3 r s 
going on. The geologists tell us that the same 
convulsions that shook the solid world in the 
time of its birth, that shot the mountains up 
and dug the channels for the seas and the riv- 
ers, are going on even in historic times. God 
is always creating. Every flower is a new 



18 THE SUPERNATURAL 

creation. Every clay lie separates the waters 
that are under the firmament from the waters 
that are above the firmament ; for he it is who 
daily and hourly lifts the clouds from their 
ocean bed and causes them to float in the air 
above. Every spring is a new creation, and 
he himself is the secret and the source and 
the center of all the life. Between the phi- 
losophy that says there is no God or there is . 
only an absentee God, and the philosophy that 
says that God is in all phenomena and if there 
were no God there would be no phenomena, 
there is certainly nothing of kin. These are 
not extremes that meet. The abolition of the 
distinction between natural and supernatural 
for the purpose of getting rid of the supernat- 
ural is one thing ; the abolition of the distinc- 
tion for the purpose of affirming that the 
supernatural is in everything is quite another. 
A writer in the "Interior," of Chicago, said ? 
in a criticism on one of my lectures perhaps 
a j^ear ago, that Dr. Abbott held that God 
created amoebae, and amoebae did the rest. I 
do not know how it would be possible in a 
sentence of equal length to state more clearly 
what I exactly do not believe. I hold that 



THE SUPERNATURAL 19 

God is the secret and the source and the cen- 
ter of all life. When your spirit departs from' 
your body, the body crumbles into dust. If I 
could conceive the Spirit of God departing 
from nature, I think all nature would crumble 
to dust. No longer would the planets circle 
around the sun ; no longer would clouds float 
in the air ; no longer would the sunbeams flood 
the earth ; no longer would flowers bloom, or 
water run, or rain fall, or men walk, or living 
creatures breathe. God is himself the life of 
life. All things are his breath ; literally, sci- 
entifically, absolutely, in him all things live 
and move and have their being. 

I have, therefore, for myself, practically 
abandoned the distinction between general 
providences and special providences. A spe- 
cial providence is, in this new conception of 
God's relation to the universe, nothing but a 
general providence specially perceived. It is 
a clearer perception of the universal presence. 
God is in all the phenomena; sometimes we 
wake up and see him ; then we say, " Behold, 
a special providence." It is we who have 
opened our eyes. This is what I think Christ 
means when he says, Not a sparrow falleth to 



20 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the ground without your Father. This is 
what he means when he bids us pray day by 
day for our daily bread. The children at the 
table do not realize that the bread and milk 
which they have regularly for supper is the 
father's gift as well as the box of candy 
which he brings home on birthdays ; but the 
one is as much the father's providence as the 
other, only the children specialize the one and 
recognize it. That is all. 

Therefore, a miracle no longer seems to me 
a manifestation of extraordinary power, but 
an extraordinary manifestation of ordinary 
power. God is always showing himself. Per- 
haps some of you may think this is a new 
theology ; but this particular bit of theology 
is as old as Augustine, and as orthodox. It 
is Augustine who said, a birth — I am not 
quoting his exact words, but I am giving the 
spirit of them — a birth is more miraculous 
than a resurrection, because it is more won- 
derful that something that never was should 
begin to be, than that something which was 
and ceased to be should begin again. The 
difference between the birth and the resur- 
rection is that one is made palpable to our 



THE SUPERNATURAL 21 

senses every day, and the other in the one 
great event of human history was made pal- 
pable to the senses of a few witnesses in years 
long gone by. The mere fact that a miracle is 
an extraordinary event seems to me to consti- 
tute no reason for discrediting it. For the cred- 
ibility of an event does not depend upon the 
nature of the event, but upon the nature of the 
testimony which attests it. If the Old Testa- 
ment told the story of a naval engagement be- 
tween the Jewish people and a pagan people, in 
which all the ships of the pagan people were 
absolutely destroyed, and not a single man 
killed among the Jews, all the skeptics would 
have scorned the narrative. Every one now 
believes it — except those who live in Spain. 

Do I, then, believe in miracles ? I believe 
in some, and some events that have been 
called miracles I do not believe, and some I 
do not think were intended to be regarded as 
miracles at all. The story of the sun and the 
moon standing still I do not think was in- 
tended to be taken as history by the man who 
wrote the narrative. It was poetry, and is 
quoted from an old poetic legend. The story 
of the great fish that swallowed a prophet I 



22 THE SUPERNATURAL 

do not believe was ever intended to be taken 
as history by the man who wrote it. I think 
it is a genial yet keen satire of Jewish narrow- 
ness, written for the pnrpose of making clear 
that there is a wideness in God's mercy like 
the wideness of the sea. Some other of the 
strange events recorded in the Bible seem to 
me story rather than history ; I do not think 
them well authenticated ; nor does their his- 
torical truthfulness appear to me a matter of 
any importance. The story that once upon a 
time an ax-head dropped into a pool and sunk, 
and a prophet threw in a branch and then the 
ax-head swam again, to me carries a better 
lesson if I think of it as an illustration of the 
Hebrew folk-lore, the sort of stories that moth- 
ers told their children in the olden time, than 
it does if I try to make myself think it hap- 
pened — because I do not succeed very well 
if I do try. 1 The Book of Buth is clearly ro- 
mance, though historical romance; I see no 
reason for doubting that the Samson story is 
so also. The mere mechanical fact that one 
narrative is incorporated in the Book of 

1 In Bartlett and Peters's edition of the Scriptures this 
story is classed with Literature, not with History. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 23 

Judges and the other is separated from it does 
not seem to me to affect the question either 
of credibility or interpretation. On the other 
hand, the resurrection of Jesus Christ seems 
to me to be the best-attested fact of ancient 
history : attested by the witness of disciples 
whose interest would not have led them to 
attest it and whose prejudices were all against 
their faith in it ; attested by the change of 
the day of rest from the seventh day, which 
the Jewish nation had up to that time kept, 
to the first day, ever after celebrating the res- 
urrection ; attested by the growth and life of 
Christianity itself, which, if Christ did not 
rise from the dead, I must think was histori- 
cally founded on either a great folly or a great 
fraud, and to believe that would be to believe 
that there is no moral order in the universe. 
That the disciples had ocular evidence which 
convinced them against all their preconcep- 
tions that the Christ was living whom they 
thought was dead appears to me as certain as 
any fact in history can be. Whether that 
ocular demonstration was afforded by the re- 
turn of the departed spirit to reanimate the 
crucified body, or by the disciples' vision of 



24 THE SUPERNATURAL 

the spiritual and incorporeal body, appears to 
me a question neither possible nor important 
to determine. The former hypothesis pre- 
sents, I think, the fewer difficulties ; but the 
fact of continuous life is the one and only 
important fact. 

Surely this conception of God in all nature, 
all life, all epochs, is not carrying God away 
from us. It is bringing him nearer. If every 
springtime, as I see the buds growing and the 
leaves putting themselves forth and the flow- 
ers beginning to bloom and the birds begin- 
ning to sing, I look out and say, " God is cre- 
ating a new world ; " if in every incident and 
accident, so called, of my life, I look to see 
what the voice of God is for me, what errand 
he would send me on, what mission he would 
give me, what he means ; if all events seem to 
me to have God's voice in them, and I seek to 
understand them all and follow them all ; if 
every event is a manifestation of his presence 
and power, and a miracle only an unusual man- 
ifestation of a power equally present at all 
times and in all eras — surely my philosophy 
is not getting me away from God, but nearer 
to him. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 25 

It is not easy to formulate in a sentence 
that change which has come over my thought, 
and, as I believe, the thought of the present 
generation, respecting God's relation to man. 
Shall I say we are coming to think of God as 
dwelling in man rather than as operating on 
man from without ? This might be taken to 
imply a denial or at least a doubt of God's 
personality, and of man's personality as dis- 
tinct and separate from God's, and this impli- 
cation I vigorously and energetically disavow. 
If I speak of God in man, it is as one speaks 
of one soul working within another, so that 
the two personalities intermingle, the two 
lives are intertwined. Perhaps it will be 
better to attempt no formal statement of the 
general principle; rather to illustrate it by 
special applications. 

Revelation, then, appears to me less a sud- 
den disclosure to man of God, as some one 
external and before hidden, than a gradual 
awakening in man of that spiritual life which 
alone can take cognizance of God. Eevelation 
is the unveiling of God. There has been a 
great deal of discussion about the nature of 
inspiration. Dr. McConnell, of Brooklyn, 



26 THE SUPERNATURAL 

called attention, a year ago last winter, to 
the fact that the word inspiration occnrs but 
twice in the Bible, 1 and only once in such con- 
nection that it can be deemed to refer to 
Scriptural teaching. The claim of the Bible 
writers for themselves is not that they were 
inspired by God, but that they have made a 
revelation of God. What does this mean ? 

Revelation is unveiling, and discovery is 
uncovering ; two words more nearly synony- 
mous I do not know where to find. The rev- 
elation of God is simply the unveiling or the 
uncovering or the discovery of God. What 
the Bible writers claim for themselves is this : 
" We have been studying life, history, nature, 
our own personal experiences ; and we have 
found some truths about God, and we tell you 
what they are." The word discovery is used 
for science ; the word revelation for theology ; 
but they mean substantially the same thing — 
the unveiling of the secret of life. Science 
goes a little way in the search and stops ; the 
prophet goes further, and discovers behind all 
the forces and all the laws which science has 
discovered the Infinite and Eternal Energy 
1 Job xxxii., 8; 2 Timothy iii., 16. 



THE SUPERNATURAL 27 

from which all things proceed, the Power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness — in 
a word, God. Discovery is the revelation of 
the laws and forces operating in nature. Eev- 
elation is the discovery of Him who is the 
Lawgiver and the Force-producer. Discovery 
is revelation in the physical realm ; revelation 
is discovery in the spiritual realm. The man 
of outsight, with skill in the observation of 
the sensuous world, is a discoverer ; the man 
of insight, with skill in the perception of the 
invisible world, is a revelator. 

God has given to different nations different 
missions. He has given to Eome the mission 
of teaching the world the meaning of law ; to 
Greece the meaning of art and philosophy ; 
to the Hebrew race the meaning of religion. 
He has given this race this message : Tell the 
world what you can learn of God and his 
relation to men. The Hebrew people have 
added nothing to the architecture, the art, the 
philosophy of life ; but they have been a pro- 
phetic race — discoverers of God. In this 
race there were pre-eminently religious men, 
who saw God more clearly than their fellows, 
and God's relation to mankind more clearly, 



28 THE SUPERNATURAL 

and God's relation to human events more 
clearly, and told their fellows what they saw. 
And, from all their telling, natural selection 
says the scientist, providence says the theo- 
logian — I say the two are the same — elected 
those that had in them the most vital truth, 
the most enduring, the most worthy to endure. 
Thus we have in the Old Testament something 
like twoscore of writers, the most spiritually- 
minded of a spiritually-minded race, telling 
us what they have discovered concerning God. 
This is the Bible. It is the gradual discovery 
of God in the hearts and through the tongues 
of prophets who were themselves members of 
a prophetic race. 

God is always revealing himself, and has 
always been revealing himself. He has al- 
ways been knocking at the door ; he has 
always been standing at the window. He 
has always been showing his character. They 
who nave seen it best and most clearly, and 
had power to tell us what they have seen, are 
the world's prophets. What is distinctive in 
respect to Hebrew law is not its universal 
applicability to the human race — there is a 
great deal in the Hebrew law to which we no 



THE SUPERNATURAL 29 

longer pay any attention ; it is the recognition 
of the fact that God is the great lawgiver. 
What is peculiar in the Hebrew history is not 
its narration of great battles, great statesmen's 
endeavors and achievements ; it is the history 
of the dealing of God with a particular people. 
God is as truly with the American race as he 
ever was with the Hebrew race ; as truly with 
Abraham Lincoln as he was with Moses. The 
difference between the Hebrew race and the 
American race is the difference between the 
Old Testament Scriptures and the modern 
newspaper. The modern newspaper is enter- 
prising, and it gathers news, and gathers 
gossip that is not news, from the four quar- 
ters of thft globe ; but it fails to see God in 
human history. The Old Testament prophets 
did not show the same enterprise, did not 
have the same wideness of view ; but they did 
see G-od in human history, and have helped 
us to see him. That vision of God is equally 
chaTacteristic of the fiction of the Bible — 
Bi\th, Esther, Jonah, the parable of the prod- 
igal son (there are some people who think it 
is irreverent to suggest that there is any fic- 
tion in the Old Testament, but quite right to 



30 THE SUPERNATURAL 

find it in the words of Christ in the New) ; 
ai;?d of the drama of the Bible — the epic 
drains of Job, the love drama of the Song of 
Songs. In these is seen a manifestation, a 
revelation ^of goodness and truth and right- 
eousness, ana 1 , above all, of a personal God 
dealing with men. This is the characteristic 
of the Hebrew poetry. We find more beauti- 
ful phrasing in Woi ■'dsworth, or in Tennyson, 
or in Longfellow, or in 1 Whittier, but nowhere 
do you find in literature, ancient or modern, 
such discoveries of God < as in the Hebrew 
Psalter. The " Eternal Goodness " may seem 
to you more beautiful than the One Hundred 
and Third Psalm ; but would V^hittier have 
written " Eternal Goodness " if . he had not 
read the One Hundred and Third I > salm ? 

But if this be so, and the Bible be a revela- 
tion and disclosure of God, why not n ew rev- 
elations ? why not new disclosures ? w iiy not 
a new Bible ? If the American continent was 
discovered by Columbus, why does not some 
one discover a new continent ? Becausf 3 we 
have discovered all the continents there are. 
What is it that this Bible tells us about G od, 
the Infinite and the Eternal Energy from 



THE SUPERNATURAL 31 

which all things proceed, the Power not our- 
selves that makes for righteousness ? Sum it 
all up, put it in the briefest statement ; what 
does it tell us respecting God ? 

God is love. Love is service. The highest 
manifestation of service is self-sacrifice. The 
highest self-sacrifice is the laying down of 
one's life for the sake of the wholly unde- 
serving. 

Is there anything to be added to that mes- 
sage ? Can you conceive of any statement 
respecting the Infinite and Eternal Energy 
from which all things proceed, the Power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness, be- 
yond these four declarations — first, this Infi- 
nite and Eternal Energy is love ; second, this 
love shows itself in unpaid service ; third, 
this service runs beyond all self-glorification 
into self-sacrifice ; and, last of all, this self- 
sacrifice shows itself in laying down life that 
the undeserving may walk along the prostrate 
form up to the eternal heights of glory ? If 
any one has another revelation, let him bring 
it. 

But there is opportunity, infinite oppor- 
tunity, for added disclosure of God, added 



32 THE SUPERNATURAL 

revelation of God, in the unfolding and appli- 
cation of this truth to the experiences of the 
nation, the church, and the individual. If it 
were not so, you and I could not go on preach- 
ing upon this Bible. If there were not reve- 
lations in the Bible that the Bible writers 
themselves did not fully comprehend ; if there 
were not revelations in the Bible that all the 
past has not discovered ; if we were not con- 
tinually finding new meanings in old texts ; if 
God was not continually rewriting his Bible 
in our experience, and giving us a new mes- 
sage to new generations, we might well close 
our church doors and stop our preaching. 
We preachers are not to stop at the revela- 
tion which God has made of himself to others; 
we are to take that revelation that he may be 
revealed to us and by us. The Bible is a guide 
to revelation, not a substitute for it. Only as 
we so use the Bible that we stop not at the 
book, but go through the book to the God who 
gave it forth, are we worthy to be prophets 
and preachers in this nineteenth century. 

The forgiveness of sins is, in my thinking 
of it, no longer an exceptional, episodical 
manifestation of a supernatural grace; it is 



THE SUPERNATURAL 33 

the revelation and effect of the habit of mind 
of the Eternal Father toward all his children. 
The laws of forgiveness are a part of the laws 
of the Almighty and the All-gracious. It is 
said that the violation of natural law is never 
forgiven. It is said that if you put your fin- 
ger in the candle, it will burn, pray as you 
will, and if you fall from your horse, you will 
break a bone, however pious you may be ; 
whether the bone breaks or not depends, not 
upon your piety, but upon your age. Is it 
indeed true that there is no forgiveness in 
natural law ? What a strange-looking audi- 
ence this would be if there were none ! The 
boy cuts his finger and nature begins to heal 
it; he breaks his arm — nature begius to knit 
the bone; he burns his finger — nature pro- 
vides a new skin. Nature, that is, God, im- 
plants in man himself the help-giving powers 
that remove disease ; and, in addition, stores 
the world full of remedies also, so that spe- 
cifics may be found for almost every disease to 
which flesh is heir. The laws of healing are 
wrought into the physical realm ; they are a 
part of the divine economy; and shall we 
think that He who helps the man to a new 



34 THE SUPERNATURAL 

skin and to a new bone cares nothing for his 
moral nature, and will not help him when he 
has fallen into sin ? 

Forgiveness of sin is not remission of pen- 
alty. It may include that, or it may not ; but 
it is not that. Redemption is not letting a 
man out of one place and putting him into 
another; it is not barring the doors of hell 
and throwing open the doors of heaven. The 
phrase used in the Greek Testament for the 
forgiveness of sins is two Greek words mean- 
ing sending away of sin ; and I believe I am 
right, though I make the statement with some 
hesitation, that that Greek phrase, the send- 
ing away of sin, is never used in classical 
Greek to signify forgiveness, and is always 
used in the New Testament Greek to signify 
forgiveness. Two men are arrested and are 
brought before a New York court ; one is sent 
to Elmira Reformatory, where he must stay 
until he is cured; one is sent to Sing Sing 
for ten years. The one who is sent to Sing 
Sing has political influence and gets a pardon 
after he has been there three months, and 
comes out to plunge into thievery again ; the 
other man stays ten years in Elmira Reform- 



THE SUPERNATURAL 35 

atory, and comes out an honest man, to live 
an honest life. Which of these men is re- 
deemed ? — the man who escapes the penalty 
and continues in the sin, or the man who is 
delivered from the sin and bears the penalty ? 
Forgiveness is not remission of penalty, though 
it may include that. Forgiveness is remis- 
sion of the sin itself ; and God is always lift- 
ing off the sins of the world. " Though your 
sins be as scarlet, they " — the sins themselves 
— " shall be as white as snow." " This is my 
blood of the new testament, which is shed for 
many for the remission of " — penalty ? No ! 
— " the remission of sin." I no longer believe 
that Christ died that he might bear the pen- 
alty which a just God must inflict because 
law required it ; I believe he died that he 
might give life by his death — the remission, 
not of penalty, but of the sin itself. " Be- 
hold," says John, " the Lamb of God which 
taketh away the sin of the world." Oh, how 
we belittle Scripture ! I used to think that 
text meant, Behold, the Lamb of God which 
takes away some sins from some men, in some 
parts of the world. No! He is the Lamb 
of God, who is taking away the sin from the 



36 THE SUPERNATURAL 

world, and when his work is done the end will 
be a sinless world. 

I no longer think of sacrifice as one act 
done on man's behalf by the Son of God to 
propitiate divine wrath or satisfy divine law. 
I believe not less but more profoundly in sac- 
rifice since I have come to think of it as the 
law of spiritual life, and of Christ as the Lamb 
of God slain from the foundation of the world. 
For the phrase "suffering love" appears to 
me to be tautology. Love must suffer so long 
as the loved one sins or suffers. So long as 
God is love and his children sin and suffer, 
God suffers with and for them. The sacrifice 
of Christ is the revelation of a sacrifice which 
will not end till sin and suffering shall be no 
more. From the hour when Eve looked with 
puzzled anguish into the unresponsive face of 
Abel, marble-like in the mystery of death, and 
then went out in the unutterable longings of 
a mother's heart after the fugitive brother, 
down to this hour, love has suffered for the 
stricken and for the sinful, and through an- 
guished and broken hearts has poured itself 
out in sacrifice to save. Vicarious sacrifice is 
the law of life ; that is, it is the law of God's 



THE SUPERNATURAL 37 

own nature. The divinest thing man ever 
does is to suffer for another ; and the divinest 
form of sacrifice is that suffered for the un- 
worthy ; and its greatest triumph is won 
when, through sacrifice, the unworthy be- 
comes worthy. The loug history of love's 
sacrifices seems to me the history of God's 
love dwelling in human hearts and inspiring 
human lives to their highest and divinest ser- 
vice ; and the sacrifice of Christ seems to me 
the climacteric expression of that love, the 
supreme revelation of God's life, the supreme 
gift of God's life. The sacrifice is offered not 
by nor on behalf of man to God, but by God 
for the life of man ; it is not the condition on 
which God grants forgiveness, but the method 
by which he forgives — that is, delivers his 
children from the death of sin by imparting 
to them the life of holiness. As the truth of 
God is revealed in all the teachings of proph- 
ets, as the benevolence of God is revealed in 
all the philanthropies of the humane, so the 
deeper love of God is revealed in all the sacri- 
ficial love of earth's vicarious sufferers. And 
as Christ is the consummation of the revela- 
j tion of the truth of God by his teaching, and 



38 THE SUPERNATURAL 

of the benevolence of God by his service, so 
is he the consummation of the deeper love of 
God by his suffering and sacrifice. 

Incarnation : what is that ? God was in 
Christ. Why? Christ said of himself, "I 
am the door." A door is not to be simply 
looked at ; you push it open and go in. Why 
was God in Christ ? Why was Christ a door ? 
In order that through Christ God might enter 
into the human race and the human race 
might enter into Christ. 

In my friend's house on the Hudson River 
is a window framed in as though it were a 
picture; one opening the door and coining 
into that room and looking, sees, as though 
hanging on the wall, a picture, including the 
mountains, the valley, the river, the distant 
city. I imagine two persons coming in and 
looking at that picture ; one saying, " This is 
an image of the landscape hand-painted ;" the 
other, "No, that is the real mountain, the 
real valley, the real river, seen through a 
glass." The one no less than the other thinks 
the real is represented. That seems to me 
fairly to represent the difference between the 
liberal Congregationalist and the orthodox 



THE SUPERNATURAL 39 

Unitarian. The orthodox Unitarian looks at 
the picture on the wall, and says, "That is 
not the image of God, but it looks exactly like 
him." Now, I am orthodox ; I believe that 
through the window I see God himself in 
Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the image of 
God, the reflection of God, God manifest in 
the flesh ; that is, such a manifestation of God 
as is possible in a human life. I never say, I 
never should say, Jesus Christ is God, because 
what I said a few moments ago, and you then 
agreed with me, I repeat now, when some of 
you will not agree with me : God is more 

THAN THE SUM OF ALL HIS MANIFESTATIONS. 

Jesus Christ is one of the manifestations of 
God, but God is more than the sum of all his 
manifestations. 1 You hear a great preacher 
like Phillips Brooks, and you say, "I have 
heard Phillips Brooks." I beg your pardon 
— you have heard one little bit of Phillips 

iThe question of the tri-personality of God — the 
Trinity of Person as distinguished from the Trinity of 
manifestation — including the question of the conscious 
pre-existence of the Logos, it did not come within the 
province of this address to discuss. Personally I accept 
the Trinitarian view of tri-personality ; that is, that the 
Trinity of manifestation apparent to us has a oasis in a 
Trinity of Person necessarily hidden from us. 



40 THE SUPERNATURAL 

Brooks. He is a great deal more than any 
sermon he ever preached ; and if you gather 
all his sermons together and read them all, 
still there are in him resources that you have 
not seen. When I look at the one transcend- 
ent historical manifestation of God in Jesus 
Christ tabernacling in the flesh, there is no 
praise I would give to the Father that I will 
not give to him, no prayer I will direct to the 
Father that I will not direct to him, no rever- 
ence I will show to the Father that I will not 
show to him ; and yet, when I am asked of 
my philosophy, Is Jesus Christ God ? I reply, 
God is more than the sum of all his manifes- 
tations, and, therefore, God is more than Jesus 
Christ. Jesus Christ is God manifest in the 
flesh, and God entering into that flesh in order 
that he may enter into the whole of humanity ; 
God in man. 

The question is sometimes asked — it was 
asked, I remember, a few years ago of a young 
theological student in this very State of Maine 
— " Do you think the divinity of Jesus Christ 
differs in kind or differs in degree from the 
divinity in man?" He replied, "In degree." 
For that he was sharply called to an account 



THE SUPERNATURAL 41 

by the "Advance," and we asked in The 
Outlook, "Will the 'Advance' tell us how 
the divinity in man differs in kind from the 
divinity in God ?" and never got an answer. 
There are not two kinds of divinity. If there 
are, then there are two kinds of God. That is 
polytheism. There is only one divine patience, 
one divine righteousness, one divine justice, 
one divine love, one divine mercy. The di- 
vinity in man is the same in kind as the divin- 
ity in Christ, because it is the same in kind 
as the divinity in God. We are made in God's 
image. That means that we are in kind like 
God. It is sin, and only sin, which makes 
us unlike him. We are children of God. 
That means that our natures are themselves 
begotten of him, flow forth from him. A sin- 
less man would be the image of the Eternal 
Father, because the child of the Eternal 
Father, begotten of God. God has come into 
Christ and filled that one life full of himself, 
so that when you look at it you look through 
the glass and see the Father ; and this he has 
done in order that he may come into your life 
and my life ; in order that he may dwell in 
us and till us full of himself. 



42 THE SUPERNATURAL 

If one objects to the statement that God is 
incarnating himself in the human race, I will 
not use the phraseology, because I will not 
shock people's minds needlessly ; but I believe 
that God came into Christ and filled Christ 
full of himself in order that he might come 
into us and fill us full of himself. And so I 
dare to try to go where he leads ; and when 
he climbs those mountain heights, stands so 
far above me, and still beckons and calls down 
to me, and says, " Lyman Abbott, follow me," 
I believe I can, or he would not call me ; he 
would not tell me to go if he would not give 
me the power to go. And so I dare to pray, 
though as with bated breath, the prayer which 
Paul has taught us : " That Christ may dwell 
in your hearts by faith ; that ye, being rooted 
and grounded in love, may be able to compre- 
hend with all saints what is the breadth, and 
length, and depth, and height ; and to know 
the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, 
that ye might be filled with all the fullness of 
God." 

It seems to me, then, that the relation of na- 
ture and the supernatural to Christian thought 
has undergone a great change in the last half- 



THE SUPERNATURAL 43 

century ; and that it is a change which pro- 
motes Christian life, because it brings God 
nearer to us in our Christian thought, and 
makes religion seem more natural and more 
real. In the thought of to-day God is not 
apart from nature and life, but in nature and 
life : creation is continuous ; all events are 
providential ; revelation is progressive ; for- 
giveness is through law, not in violation of it; 
sacrifice is the divine method of life-giving ; 
incarnation is not consummated until God 
dwells in all humanity and Jesus Christ is 
seen to be the first-born among many brethren. 
Then, when God's work is done, and he is 
everywhere — as he is now everywhere but in 
the hearts of those who will not have him — 
when he is in all human hearts and lives, as 
he has been in all nature and in all history, 
then will come the end, and God will be all 
and in all. 



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